Colonel Jack O’Neill pushed open the door to his office, sighing as he caught sight of his over filled in-tray; today would start with reports and end with extreme boredom and eyestrain.

Ambling around the desk toward his chair, Jack reached out for the first file on the top of the large mountain of paperwork situated to one side of the table.

As he lifted it a large pink envelope dropped out to land face down on the blotting pad in front of him. Putting the file down before him, he reached cautiously for the offending item and dragged it carefully towards him.

O’Neill handled it gently, much as if someone had asked him to defuse a letter bomb and gingerly turned it over to look at the face. There was of course just his name written on the front and, to be exact, it was typewritten so there wasn’t the easy option of trying to identify the handwriting. This called for extreme measures… opening the envelope!

He reached out and picked up his handy fishing rod novelty paper knife and inserted the point under the edge of the flap then, ripping the knife through the paper, he slit the top of the envelope.

Jack swallowed nervously as he set aside the paper knife and reached into the large pink monstrosity, drawing out a card covered in hearts and flowers. The printed message as per usual was sickly sweet and contained absolutely no information as to who had sent it to him.

Every year since the Stargate had become active he’d received a similar card and every year he’d try to find out who had sent it. Each time he was doomed to failure and he’d had to wait to see if one would turn up the next year.

The first time he’d asked every female he’d ever met on the base if they’d sent it and every single one just smiled and winked at him. The second time he’d thought that perhaps it was someone on his team but Carter, Teal’c and Daniel had all smiled and winked at him. Seeing Teal’c smile and wink at him had proved a very disturbing sight and required a stiff drink afterwards.

The third time he’d expanded his horizons and included all of the SG teams to the list, that was of course the time Makepiece had fallen off of the end of the locker room bench laughing hysterically and broken his arm.

The fourth time was just plain embarrassing, coming out of the shower to find that someone had switched his shorts and tee-shirt for a set dyed a colour called Passionate Pink. What was worse was to find that the rest of your clothes had vanished and you had to go out into the main locker room to get to your spare uniform to the cat calls of three SG teams and a troop of visiting rebel Jaffa.

Jack shuddered as he remembered those first four years of complete and utter hell; he’d had to put up with an amazing amount of teasing after some of those stunts.

O’Neill cringed at the thought of the arrival of the fifth Valentines Card. That one wasn’t delivered with the internal mail… Oh no! Nothing as simple as that!

It was waiting for him in the Briefing Room; it was just sitting there on the table when he came in to join a meeting between the Tok’ra, the rebel Jaffa, the Asgard and of course the Tau’ri. He still remembered the feeling of being under a microscope as he opened that telltale pink envelope to reveal a card decorated with hearts and flowers.

The feelings of embarrassment multiplied as Daniel and Carter took it upon themselves to explain the custom to their visitors. Jack still remembered the feeling of wanting to vanish beneath the table when he glanced up to see Thor wink at him.

Colonel Jack O’Neill summoned all of his courage and stood up, still clutching the offending item in a sweaty hand. He pushed the chair back and stepped around the desk in the direction of the door.

Thoughts of what could possibly happen this year started running through his head like Lemmings heading for the edge of a cliff and as he drew closer to the door, he stopped and turned decisively towards a piece of machinery standing over by the wall.

Jack reached out with the hand not clutching the card of doom and switched the machine on, extending his other hand he proceeded to carefully feed the card into the shredder.

Colonel Jack O’Neill sighed with relief as the card was turned into thin card strips. This year it was going to be different, this year he was going to save not just his sanity but his composure as well.

This year the card got lost in the post, that’s what he was saying and he’d stick to it!

The End.